Accountability in public life - The biggest threat to our society

DESPITE the reassuring, reinvigorating march of Spring, nature’s greatest expression of optimism, it is increasingly difficult to hope that the culture of evasion and bloody-minded opposition to accountability might ever be confronted much less eradicated from public life.

It is now hard not to concede that all that is aspirational and good; that all of the ambitious plans for this society might not be undone by the Irish omerta that characterises the relationship between public institutions and the kept-in-the-dark citizens of this dishonest Republic.

That denial of responsibility, that unacceptable, anti-social ordering of interests has become a runaway cancer.